Cuba

[prentice crawford]

Woof,
 As we take the yellow brick road to socialism we pass by those coming the other way who now know better.

Cuba to eliminate 500,000 state jobs and spur's private sector.

 www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39152912/ns/world_news-americas

                                  P.C.

[Crafty_Dog]

When next we meet ask me about my trip to Cuba , , , in January 1980 IIRC. (For the record folks, the trip was entirely legal and above board-- it was during a brief opening under Carter and was organized by my law school.  It turned out to be about 2 months before the Port Mariel exodus.

[prentice crawford]

Woof Guro Craftydog,
 You have got to be kidding me. You never cease to amaze me with your adventures! I was in the Corps at the time and felt lucky that I wasn't sent down to Florida to help with that mess.
                   P.C.

[Crafty_Dog]

I was there for about ten days and because of my comfort level in Spanish and my general way of going about things, most days I was able to escape the Potemkin tours (for those of you educated by progressives, google the term Potemkin Village) and wound up running with a bunch of musicians.  One of them, Roberto, a dancer in the national folklore company, escaped during the Mariel exodus and looked me up in NYC.  He asked me if there were any decent salsa clubs in NY.  I said why yes, we had a few and took him to one.  The band playing was Ticpica 73 with Alfredo de la Fey on electric violin and Nicky Marreror on timbales.  We walked in and they knew my friend from when they toured Cuba on a cultural exchange a few years prior!  Roberto chose the hottest chick dancing on the floor and began to dance with her.  It was like a movie; he was so good the whole floor cleared for the two of them.  Then the band invited us backstage to hang out and thus began an interesting chapter in my life.

[prentice crawford]

Woof,
 That's very cool, I had a similar musical stint in my life but involving the Texas Two Step and my two boneheaded cousins that are country music stars today. Of course being from Kentucky I speak fluent country and when they were still playing the bars, I would show the ladies how to Two Step and occasionally I'd get up on stage, play a flat top and sing Long Haired County Boy. "People say I'm no good and crazy as a loon, cause I get stoned in the mornin(g) and get drunk in the afternoon."  
 Ah, the good ole days!
                               P.C.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/report-hezbollah-sets-up-shop-in-cuba/

[prentice crawford]

 

Carta de Cuba, la escritura de la libertad
 
 CUBA IN THE MIDDLE EAST
A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY


DOMINGO AMUCHASTEGUI (1)

Foreword By
Haim Shaked, Director
Middle East Studies Institute
July, 1999

Contents:

INTRODUCTION
CHRONOLOGY
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY





INTRODUCTION

After a close relationship with Middle Eastern groups and countries for forty years, Cuba enjoys today an exceptional position in the region with embassies in almost all countries, and with a wide variety of political connections within the ruling elites. Castro is engaged in a growing process of enlarging bilateral trade, financial assistance, involvement in joint ventures, and cooperation projects, as well as in diplomatic cooperation in the international system.

The context has changed over the years. While the priorities are not to channel weapons to groups within the region, there are still some specialized military assistance, training and cooperation, especially with the PLO. Yet Cuba's priorities now are to obtain investments, economic cooperation, and trade opportunities from Iran, Algeria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, and others.

For U.S. interests, the closeness of the relationship with Iraq and some of the more militant terrorist groups in the Middle East is troublesome. Can Cuba be used to carry out terrorist acts against U.S. targets? Is there any cooperation between Sadam Hussein and Castro in the development of chemical and bacteriological weapons? What remains from the close cooperation between Castro and the more militant terrorist groups in the region? These and other questions are of critical importance to the security of the United States. Cuba's proximity to the U.S., the continuous flow of immigrants from the island and the increased travel from and to Cuba should make Castro's relationships a troublesome and worrysome issue to U.S. policymakers.

The Middle East and North Africa have been extremely important to Castro's foreign policy since 1959. It remains today as a region of special priority in Castro's redesign of his foreign policy after the collapse of Cuba's alliance with the former Soviet Union. Actually, there is not one single aspect of Castro's foreign policy in which the Middle East does not become important as:

1) A region connected to Cuba's non-aligned interests and policies.

2) An area where Cuba laid the foundations for the deployment of regular military forces and the establishment of military cooperation over the last 40 years.

3) A region from where to gain knowledge/connections/influence with "liberation movements" throughout Africa and the Middle East.

4) A base for triangular operations in connection with Intelligence/subversive activities in Latin America.

5) A source of influence with Arab communities in Latin America and the Caribbean.

6) A region in which trade, loans, cooperation, and diplomatic support has become very important, especially in the 1990's.

7) After Vietnam, a virtual laboratory, in the military field, in particular since the Six Day War (1967), for updating and upgrading Cuba's military capabilities, including technological and operational capacities.

A region where the Arab-Islamic states are extremely important due to their voting power within the UN system for Cuba's multilateral diplomacy.

It is within such a context that the relevance of the Middle East for Cuba's foreign policy should be understood. The following chronology is only meant to be illustrative of the depth and closesness of Cuba’s long-standing relationships with states, leaders, and groups in this troubled region.



CHRONOLOGY

1959-1963

* Relations developed with Gamal Abdel Nasser; Cuba joined the Non-Aligned Movement, sponsored by India, Yugoslavia, and Egypt. Efforts to buy weapons from Egypt failed.

* The Cuban government sent Captain José Ramón Fernández (currently vicepresident of the Cuban government) to Israel in the summer of 1959 to negotiate the purchase of light weaponry and artillery, but no agreement was reached. Instead, significant civilian assistance was granted by Israel to Cuba for more than 10 years in the field of citrus cultivation and diplomatic relations were normal until 1973.

* Raúl Castro and Che Guevara visited Cairo and established contacts with African liberation movements stationed in and supported by Cairo. Both Cuban leaders visited Gaza and expressed support for the Palestinian cause.

* Initial relations established with Baghdad under Karim Kassem. The Cuban government sent Commander William Galvez to purchase light weaponry, tanks and artillery. No agreement was reached.

* Castro established relations with the Algerian FLN through Paris and Rabat; official and public support was extended, large quantities of weapons were shipped to the FLN through Morocco (1960-1961); provided shelter, medical and educational services were provided in Cuba for wounded Algerians; political and military cooperation in the fields of counter-intelligence and intelligence were initiated. First Cuban deployment of regular military forces in support of the Algerian government against the Moroccan aggression of 1963. These forces remain to train the Algerian army for more than a year.

1964-1967

* With considerable hesitation and reluctance, Nasser cooperated with Che Guevara during his guerrilla operation in Congo-Kinshasa (former Zaire) in 1965.

* Cuba welcomed the founding of the PLO. First contacts with Palestinian FATAH between 1965 (Algiers) and 1966-67 (Damascus).

* The Tricontinental Conference was held in Havana in January, 1966 to adopt a common political strategy against colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism.

* Cuba sent weapons via Cairo, to the NLF in Southern Yemen. Cuban agents were sent on fact-finding missions to North and South Yemen (1967- 1968);

* Fidel Castro and other Cuban officials privately criticized in very harsh terms the shameful performance of the Egyptian leadership during the Six Day War in 1967. The war, as such, was thoroughly studied by the Cuban Armed Forces;

* Cuba and Syria developed a close alliance and supported FATAH and the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF).

1968-1975

* Cuba continued its military and political support for FATAH after the Syrians broke with the latter, and, later on, Cuban support was granted to other Palestinian organizations (Popular and Democratic fronts).

* Cuba sent military instructors and advisors into Palestinian bases in Jordan to train Palestinian fedayeen (1968); first high-level delegation from FATAH-PLO visited Cuba (1970).

* Several missions sent to Southern Yemen to support NLF / FATAH Ismail internally and externally, both politically and militarily.

* The Soviet Union and Cuba increased military and civilian cooperation with Southern Yemen (PDRY).

* Cuba commenced political and military cooperation with Somalia's Siad Barre (1969).

* Economic cooperation began with Libya in 1974, after serious bilateral tensions between 1969 and 1973.

* Closer connections with FATAH-PLO and other Palestinian organizations were reinforced, including training of Latin American guerrillas in Lebanon;
military support included counter-intelligence and intelligence training.

* Arafat visited Cuba in 1974.

* Arab and Non-Aligned countries pressured Cuba to break relations with Israel in 1973 and sponsor U.N. Resolution on Zionism "as a form of racial discrimination."

* Cuba provided military support and personnel to Syria during the Yom Kippur War (1973-1975).

* Cuba joined with Algeria and Libya on a diplomatic/political offensive in support of Frente POLISARIO (People's Front for the Liberation of Western Sahara and Río del Oro); later on provided military cooperation , medical services, and other forms of assistance.

1976-1982

* Cuba avoided any public condemnation of Syria's military intervention in Lebanon, although privately they did so in strong terms.

* Cuba supported the so-called "Steadfastness Front" against the U.S. backed Camp David accord.

* Additional military and political support provided to the Palestinian cause; Arafat attended the 6th Non-Aligned Conference in Havana (1979).

* At this stage, significant hard currency loans (tens of million) had been facilitated by Arafat-PLO to the Cuban government under very soft terms; Cuba granted diplomatic and political support to Arafat during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In the 1980s, Cuban universities were graduating hundreds of Palestinian students in various fields, especially from medical schools.

* The Aden (South Yemen) regime decided to support the Ethiopian radical officers commanded by Mengistu Haile Mariam, sending Yemeni military units in support of the latter against Somali aggression, and asking the Cubans to do the same. Cuba joined in, first with a group of officers headed by General Arnaldo Ochoa, a move that was followed later on by the deployment of large Cuban forces against the Somali invasion. Also as part of the alliance with the Aden regime, Cuba granted some small-scale support to the Dhofaris in their armed struggle against the monarchy in Oman until the late 1970s.

* As part of Cuba's alliance with Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime in Ethiopia, the Cuban leadership decided to engage in active political and military support for more than 10 years to the Liberation Movement of Southern Sudan headed by John Garang against the Arab-Muslim regime in Khartoum (until today there are no diplomatic relations between Khartoum and Havana).

* Cuba developed closer ties with Iraq in various areas (medical services, construction projects, grants and loans).

* Cuban military advisory to Iraq in different fields began in the mid 1970s (it was cancelled after the Iraq invasion of Iran in late 1980).

* Cuba cooperated with Libya in the political founding of the World MATHABA in Tripoli, to provide political support and coordinate revolutionary movements throughout the world. Cuba supported also Lybia's stand on Chad and in its support to the FRENTE POLISARIO.

* Despite its close links with Baghdad, Cuba recognized and praised the Iranian Revolution, although with no significant increase in bilateral ties. Once Iraq attacked Iran, Cuba withdrew its military advisors from Baghdad and adopted a position of official impartiality, though more sympathetic to Baghdad, due to its past relations.

* Castro granted political recognition to the revolution in Afghanistan in 1978, but internecine conflict and civil war prevented any strengthening of bilateral relations. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 disrupted Cuba's Non-Aligned policies at a time when Castro was chairman of the NL Movement. While publicly supporting Moscow, Fidel Castro was very critical of the Soviet invasion, something that was bitterly discussed with Soviet officials.

1983-1991

* Declining economic cooperation between Cuba and Libya.

* New ties of alliance between Algeria and Libya with Morocco cut-off any further direct support from Cuba to FPOLISARIO.

* Libyan support to Latin American revolutionary movements, especially in Central America and the whole of the World MATHABA project, declined rapidly after the U.S.bombing of Tripoli in 1986; Cubans increasingly distant until MATHABA's last meeting in 1990 in Tripoli, where the termination of the Libyan project was pretty obvious for all the participants, including the Cuban delegation.

* The Palestinian Intifada increases Cuba’s support for Arafat and the PLO, both diplomatic and military.

* Cuba starts exploring other possibilities for increased diplomatic recognition and economic ties in the region, including Saudi Arabia (two Cuban ambassadors were sent for that purpose, but with no significant success); the Gulf States, Jordan, Turkey (with much better results: embassies were finally established in Kuwait, Turkey, Qatar, and Jordan); and even Israel (with no official success, but with promising inroads within the private sector and some political/religious forces).

* After the violent collapse of the Aden regime, the death of Fatah Ismail, andthe reunification with North Yemen, Cuban authorities negotiated with the government of Sanaa from which bilateral relations continued to develop, including areas of economic and political cooperation.

* After the negotiations leading to the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority, Cuban-Palestinian military cooperation was enhanced, including the areas of counter-intelligence and intelligence.

* Cuba condemned Iraq for its invasion and annexation of Kuwait, supporting the latter's sovereignty; it also condemned U.S. military operations in the Gulf and abstained from supporting the bulk of the sanctions imposed on Baghdad. A Cuban military delegation was sent to Iraq to learn and share what was considered vital information and experiences from U.S. combat operations in Kuwait and Iraq.

1992-1999

* Embassies were opened in Qatar, Turkey, Tunisia and Jordan; trade and joint ventures were developed. Diplomatic ties and trade relationships have increased discreetly with Egypt and Libya; Qatar supported Cuba in the 1999 sessions on Human Rights at Geneva.

* A high-level PLO military delegation including the new head of Intelligence paid a non-public visit to Cuba.

* Israeli firms provided capital, technology and markets to Cuba in the field of citrus cultivation and exports; religious and political delegations visited were exchanged..

* Lebanon's normalization in the 1990's allowed Cuba to reach important financial and trade agreements, including Lebanese participation in joint ventures and in establishing a branch of the Fransabank in Havana. Nabih Berri, in 1998, the Chairman of the Lebanese parliament paid a long and successful, visit to Cuba during the month of Ramadan, and more recently Adnan Kassar, president of the Fransabank and the International Chamber of Commerce paid an official visit to Havana.

* Iranian-Cuban relations have increased after several high-ranking delegations from Iran visited Cuba: the Vice-President, the Minister of Foreign Relations, the Minister of Public Health, and the Minister of Social Assistance. The Cuban Minister of Public Health visited Iran in 1998. In the last two years the number of Cuban doctors, paramedics, and medical services hired by Teheran have increased, together with additional purchases of Cuban pharmaceuticals and biotechnology products. A recent agreement (1999) was signed, establishing Cuba's assistance in setting up social security/social assistance networks in Iran.

* The recent election of Abdelaziz Bouteflika (April 1999) as President of Algeria, opens new opportunities for Cuba, given Bouteflika's close relationship with the Cuban government for more than 40 years.

* PLO leaders continue to have close relations with the Cuban leadership, having access to specialized military and intelligence training, either in Cuba or Palestinian territory, and in the sharing of intelligence.

* Cuba continues to actively undermine U.S. policies in the Middle East and North Africa in primarily three ways: a) Portraying U.S. actions and diplomacy in the region as those of an aggressor, seeking to impose hegemony by force such as the recurrent attacks on Iraq, violation of sovereign rights (no-fly zones), the perpetuation of unjustified economic sanctions to countries in the region (Iraq, Iran, Syria), open political intervention and the use of brutal force as acts of retaliation (the Bin Laden case/Yugoslavia); b) portraying the U.S. as the main obstacle to a peaceful settlement of the Israel/Palestine and the Gulf conflicts, and c) discrediting U.S. policies, especially by gaining support for Cuba's agenda at the U.N. These Anti-American views and policies are conveyed as a systematic message through a network of Cuban embassies in most countries of the region, at the U.N. and its multilateral system plus Cuban embassies and missions throughout the Western Hemisphere and other significant non-governmental political and cultural channels.


GLOSSARY

1. FLN. Front de Libération National, the political and military organization that led the war of national liberation against French colonial rule between 1954 and 1962. Ruling political party until the 1980s in Algeria.

2. PLO. Palestine Liberation Organization, founded in Cairo, in 1964, under the auspices of Egypt (then known as the United Arab Republic) to serve Nasser's manipulations of the Palestinian cause, composed mostly of conservative Palestinian intellectuals and bureaucrats serving Arab governments. An instrument of Nasser's foreign policy until the June War of 1967, when the old PLO leadership collapsed to be replaced by FATEH's leadership headed by Arafat.

3. FATEH. Acronym for Palestine National Liberation Movement, founded in 1959 by younger generations of Palestinians that had experienced the defeats of 1948 and 1956, strongly committed to a radical nationalist platform to fight for Palestine and against Arab intervention and manipulations of the Palestinian problem. Mostly an underground and not legally recognized organization until the June War in 1967; it transformed itself into the most powerful and influential party inside Palestinian and Arab politics, controlling the PLO effectively since 1969, when Arafat becomes its chairman.

4. Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The most important branch of the Arab Nationalist Movement (known as the ANM, created in the 1950s as radical followers of Nasser). After the June War of 1967 splitting away from Nasser and focusing on building a more radical alternative within the Palestinians under the name of Popular Front, led by George Habash; a later off-spring, in 1969, was the Democratic Front led by Nayef Hawatmeh. Strongly based in Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, and the Gulf, until 1970 heavily engaged in terrorist methods. After 1970 dropped such tactics, became more active and open across the occupied territories and southern Lebanon, adopting Marxist-Leninist ideology.

5. Frente POLISARIO. Frente Popular de Liberación del Sagía el Hamra y Río del Oro, inspired by the ANM tradition and the Algerian FLN, created to fight against the Spanish-Morrocan-Mauritinian arrangements to split the former colony of Saguía el Hamra/Río del Oro (known as Western Sahara) between the two African states. Enjoyed active support from Algeria and Libya together with a considerable number of African states until the 1980s.

6. NFL. National Front for the Liberation of South Yemen, another important, and successful, branch of the Arab Nationalist Movement. Created in 1962 in the course of the revolution in North Yemen, against the monarchy and supported by Nasser. Expanded to the south of Yemen and began armed struggle against British colonial occupation and local feudal lords (sultans and sheikhs). Broke with Nasser in 1966-1967 and finally forced the British to negotiate and evacuate Aden, followed by the defeat of the local feudal lords. Since 1965 it has had very close relations with Cuba. Main leader was Abdel Fatah Ismail. Internecine conflicts sine the late 1970s eventually led to open civil war in 1990 and the collapse of the regime, the death of Fatah Ismail, and integration with the north under the control of the government in Sanaa.

7. World MATHABA. A Libyan project from the late 1970s to promote political, financial, and military support for revolutionary movements throughout the world. Ghaddafi called on other "revolutionary governments" to support this project, which Cuba did although with extreme caution and distrust. Cuba could not refuse to join due to the fact that its major allies in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and even the Soviet Union had accepted to participate and that many of them were benefitting from Libya's abundant financial support. Although governments -like the case of Cuba- took part at the level of political deliberations and to coordinate common actions in the diplomatic and political fields, MATHABA was something else: essentially a tool in the hands of the Libyans to project their individual goals and agenda (Ghaddafi's Green Book, to reward his supporters, and to undermine his enemies). Financial and military assistance was never a collective decision, but responded for the most part to bilateral arrangements between Ghaddafi's regime and individual organizations, some of which resorted, at different stages, to terrorist methods like the IRA and ETA. Insurgencies in Central America, like the Sandinistas and others, were privileged beneficiaries along with the African National Congress, FRENTE POLISARIO, and others. Cuban leaders were always anxious to counterbalance Libyan attempts for unilateral actions, to influence Cuban allies or about Ghaddafi's hostility toward well-known Cuban allies such as Arafat. The dominant perception among Cuban leaders was that Ghaddafi posed too many unnecessary security risks the U.S. and too many complications within Cuban alliances.

8. People's Liberation Movement of Southern Sudan. The final outcome of different secessionist movements in southern Sudan during the 1960s and early 1970s (like the Anya-Nyas) fighting against Arab-Islamic control of the central government, allocation of resources, and religious, political, and ethnic intolerance.

9. Eritrean Liberation Front. The most influential Eritrean organization fighting for secession from Ethiopia in the 1960s, actively supported by the Syrian regime since 1965. Various internal divisions developed later on until the late 1970s, when a new front was built based on very different domestic and external alliances and, eventually led the Eritreans to victory. Cuba's support to Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime in 1978 meant the cessation of previous Cuban backing to the Eritrean cause.

10. PDRY. People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, official name adopted by the Southern Yemeni independent republic.

11. Gamal Abdel Nasser. A colonel in the Egyptian army, member of the Free Officers Movement formed after the defeat in 1948 at the hands of the newly-born state of Israel. Led the revolution that overthrew the monarchy in 1952. Undertook signficant economic, social, and political transformations, setting much of the basic tenets and role-model of Arab nationalsm after WWII. Co-founder of the Neutralist countries in 1956 and of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. Defeated by Israel in 1948, 1956, and 1967.

12. Karim Kassem. A colonel in the Iraqi army and, at the beginning, a follower of Nasser. Led the revolution against the monarchy in 1958. A rival of Nasser later on, a bloody military coup inspired and mostly led by the Arab BAATH party, a strong and influential inter-Arab nationalist movement in the Middle East, overthrew him in 1963.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

A SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ON CUBA'S POLICIES AND ACTIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

1. Anderson, Jon Lee (1997). Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, New York, Grove Press.

2. Baez, Luis (1996). Secreto de Generales, Ciudad de La Habana, Ediciones SI-MAR, S.A.

3. B'nai B'rith (1982). "PLO Activities in Latin America," New York, Anti-Defamation League.

4. Campbell, John C. "Soviet Policy in the Middle East." Current History Num.80 (January 1981).

5. Durch, William J. ""The Cuban Military in Africa and the Middle East: From Algeria to Angola."

Studies in Comparative Communism, Num. XI (Spring-Summer 1978).

6. The Economist Foreign Report. "Castro's First Middle East Adventure: Part II."15 March, 1978.

7. Erisman, Michael H. (1985). Cuba's International Relations: The Anatomy of a Nationalistic Foreign Policy,Boulder, Westview.

8. Eran, Oded. "Soviet Middle East Policy: 1967-1973,"Rabinovich, Itamar and Haim Shaked, eds. (1978). From June to October: The Middle East Between 1967 and 1973, New Brunswick, Transaction Books.

9. Falk, Pamela S. (1986). Cuban Foreign Policy: Caribbean Tempest, Massanchussets/Toronto,

D.C. Heath and Company.

10. Fernández, Damián (1988). Cuba's Foreign Policy in the Middle East, Boulder, Westview Press. 11. Karol, K.S. (1971). Guerrillas in Power, London, Jonathan Cape.

12. Legum, Colim and Haim Shaked, eds. (1977-1980). The Middle East Contemporary Survey. Vols. IIII, New York, Holmes and Meir.

13. "Relations Between the palestinian Terrorists and Cuba." Reprinted from  Lebanon: Selected Documents. Israeli, Raphael, ed., London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983.

14. Siljander, Mark. "The Palestine Liberation Organization in Central America."Mmeo., October 1983.

15. U.S. Department of State. "The Sandinistas and the Middle Eastern Radicals."Washington D.C., August 1985.

16. Viotti, Paul R. "Politics in the Yemens and the Horn of Africa: Constraints on a Super Power."Mark V. Kauppi and R. craig Nations, eds. The Soviet Union and the Middle east in the 1980s. Lexington, D.C. Heath, 1983.


[1] Mr. Amuchastegui is a research associate at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies and a Doctoral candidate at the School of International Studies, University of Miami. He was a professor at the Higher Institute of International Relations in Havana; Guest Professor at the Cuban National Defense College; Senior Researcher at Cuba's Center for Studies of Africa and the Middle East; and Intelligence Analyst and Head of the Organization Department at the Tricontinental Organization in the 1960s and 1970s. He traveled extensively through North Africa and the Middle East. He edited Palestine: Crisis and Revolution (Havana, 1970); Palestine: Dimensions of a Conflict Sociology and Politics in Israel Contemporary History of Asia and Africa (Four Volumes, Havana, 1984-1988), together with several other books and articles. He was a direct or indirect participant in most of the developments described herein until 1993.

Arriba (up)
English Articles 2005
Open Letter to Fidel Castro
Juragua: Fallout Threat
Castro and the Middle East
Castro and Terrorism
Proposed Sentences for Human Rights Activists
RSF Protests in Paris against Cuban Repression
RSF Denounces Repression
Oswaldo Paya's Speech
Purpose and History
Daily Life in Cuba
On the Case of Elián
THE HOMELAND BELONGS TO ALL
English News

 
                                  P.C.

[Crafty_Dog]

Will the Pope Absolve Fidel Castro?
Posted By Humberto Fontova On February 10, 2012
Pope Benedict XVI will visit Cuba in March. Two of Italy’s top newspapers are reporting that Fidel Castro will avail himself of the visit to confess his sins and be accepted back into the Catholic Church, which excommunicated him in 1962.
“During this last period, Fidel has come closer to religion,” says Castro’s estranged daughter Alina who lives in Miami. “He has rediscovered Jesus at the end of his life. It doesn’t surprise me because dad was raised by Jesuits.”
A baptized and confirmed Catholic, but lifelong layman, I don’t claim expertise in ecclesiastical matters. But before granting absolution the Catholic Church, I’m fairly sure, still requires contrition—sincere contrition.
On his 1998 visit to Cuba, Pope John Paul II remarked that he was “reserving judgment on Che Guevara who had served the poor.” Upon greeting the Cuban ambassador to the Holy See in 2005, this same pontiff hailed Cuba’s “gains in health care and education.” The above makes patently obvious that, on matters Cuban, the Vatican references the same media and academic sources gleefully bestowed Havana bureaus and visas by the Castro regime. Heaven knows the Vatican is not alone on this.
So if the Italian papers are right–and with all due respect to whomever has been tasked with hearing Fidel Castro’s confession and granting his absolution—I offer the following educational items regarding Castro’s historical record of sincerity:
“Cuban mothers let me assure you that I will solve all Cuba’s problems without spilling a drop of blood.” Fidel Castro broadcast that promise into a phalanx of microphones upon entering Havana on January 7, 1959. As the jubilant crowd erupted with joy, Castro continued: “Cuban mothers let me assure you that because of me you will never have to cry.”
The following day, just below San Juan Hill in eastern Cuba, a bulldozer rumbled to a start, clanked into position, and pushed dirt into a huge pit with blood pooling at the bottom from the still-twitching bodies of almost a hundred men and boys who’d been machine-gunned without trial on the Castro brothers’ orders. Many of the victims’ mothers, wives and mothers wept hysterically from a nearby road as their loved ones were thus buried, some still alive.
Thousands upon thousands more Cuban men and boys (along with some girls) crumpled before Castro and Che’s firing squads in the days and months and years to come.
“Viva Cristo Rey!”  (Long Live Christ the King) were the last words of many of the martyrs.   Catholic youth groups were among the first to mount resistance to Castro and Che Guevara’s Stalinization of Cuba. Tragically for them, in the early ’60s the Castro regime’s KGB mentors were still flush from massacring thousands of Catholic (among many other) freedom-fighters during the Polish, Ukrainian and recent Hungarian rebellions against Soviet rule. Denied U.S. help  (from 90 miles away) while the Soviets (6,000 miles away) lavished their Caribbean satraps with massive firepower and 40,000 “advisors,” Cuba’s anti-Communist rebels fared no better than did those in Eastern Europe.
In the process of extinguishing the freedom-fighters, Castro and Che Guevara’s regime jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Stalin’s and executed more people (out of a population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler’s executed (out of a population of 65 million) in its first six. These figures come from the human rights group Freedom House and from the Black Book of Communism, authored by French scholars and translated into English by Harvard University Press, not exactly headquarters for “the vast-right wing conspiracy,” much less of “right-wing Cuban exile crackpots.”
“The defiant yells [“Viva Cristo Rey!”—“Viva Cuba Libre!”] from the bound and staked martyrs would make the walls of La Cabana prison tremble,” wrote eyewitness to the slaughter, Armando Valladares, who suffered 22 torture-filled years in Castro’s prisons and was later appointed by Ronald Reagan as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Modern history records few U.S. diplomatic tweaks as slick, or U.S. ambassadors as effective.
Given their defiance even during their last seconds alive, by mid-1961 the mere binding and blindfolding of Castro and Che’s murder victims wasn’t enough. The Left’s premier poster-boys began ordering that the freedom-fighters be also gagged. The shaken firing-squads demanded it. The yells were badly unnerving to the trigger-pullers, you see.
Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Che Guevara’s henchmen dragged him from his cell, jerked his head back to gag him, and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged and finally proven to his “prosecutors” that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “a CIA agent planting bombs.”
“FUEGO!”  The firing squad volley shattered Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag. Remember the gallant Che Guevara’s instructions to his revolutionary courts: “judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail.” And remember Harvard Law School’s invitation and rollicking ovation to Fidel Castro during the very midst of this appalling bloodbath. “We greeted each other as old friends,” gushed Jimmy Carter upon visiting Fidel Castro last year.
But back to Castro’s sincerity:
“And let me be very clear—VERY clear!” stressed Fidel Castro during his delirious reception by the cream of America’s media at the National Press Club on April 17, 1959. “We are not communists! And communists will never have influence in my country!”
Just a few things to keep in mind, Vatican officials, in the event of hearing Fidel Castro’s “confession,” and accepting his “contrition.”

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.dickmorris.com/keep-castro-sympathizer-fulton-armstrong-out-of-the-state-department-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.dickmorris.com/john-kerry-offered-to-sell-out-democracy-programs-in-cuba-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports

[Crafty_Dog]

The Challenges of a U.S.-Cuba Reconciliation
January 8, 2013 | 0731 GMT

During U.S. President Barack Obama's second term, the United States will have an opportunity to reconsider its hands-off approach to Latin America, and the next four years could even yield an end to the embargo on Cuba. Since before the election, discussion has been growing in Washington about the potential for the Obama administration to walk away from the decades-long embargo. Monday's nomination of Senator John Kerry to the position of secretary of state makes such a possibility even more concrete. Kerry has long opposed the embargo, and the Democratic Party now has a chance to dispose of a divisive domestic issue. For Cuba, however, the end of the embargo would be far more complicated.
 
To understand this issue, it is important to start with the fact that while the U.S. embargo has at least threatened a great deal of economic exchange with Cuba, its deterrent effect has been limited. Indeed, despite the island's stubborn adherence to the fundamentals of communism, Italian hotels grace Cuba's beaches and serve imported Mexican Coca Cola to thousands of European tourists annually. Even in trade with the United States, Cuba is not as isolated as may initially appear. A 2000 amendment to the embargo signed into law by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush allows U.S. agricultural producers to export certain products to Cuba. Although Cuba initially refused to take advantage of the changes, exports -- mostly of corn and poultry -- began in 2002 and totaled more than $350 million in 2011.
 

What is a Geopolitical Diary? George Friedman explains.
 
The biggest restriction on Cuba's foreign economic interchange is not the embargo, but its own policies and limited resources. Restrictive government attitudes toward foreign companies limit the kinds of investments those companies can make. And although changes have been made in recent years to gradually implement liberalization measures, they have been incremental even at their most ambitious. Cuba's fundamental economic problem is that it lacks industrialization to produce high-value goods for export; even its agricultural sector has fallen into disrepair. The island's growing reliance on tourism has injected additional foreign exchange into the economy, but has simultaneously introduced social stresses along class and racial lines.
 
Regime survival has been Cuba's overriding concern since leader Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. No longer caught between the Soviet Union and the United States, the Castro government is still very concerned about maintaining a firm hold on power. The embargo has for decades been used to confirm the view that the U.S. government is the enemy of Cuba's political order. As in many countries whose foreign policy centers on vilifying an outside power, Cuba has used the embargo as a political justification for a range of challenges faced by Cubans, from goods shortages to poor overall economic conditions. Travel restrictions also make it easier for the Cuban government to isolate its population, a policy that helps to control influence from U.S. policy groups seeking to promote democratic change in Cuba through social organization. One such accused American social organizer, Alan Gross, remains jailed in Cuba, an unmistakable message to the United States that Cuba is not yet ready to mend relations.
 
Nevertheless, there are dangers ahead that may push the island nation to consider reconciliation. Though Cuba lost the sponsorship of the Soviet Union, Venezuela's provision of around 100,000 barrels per day of subsidized petroleum products is an allotment that, if lost suddenly as a result of Venezuelan instability, would leave Cuba scrambling for billions of dollars in foreign currency to keep the island economy afloat. Efforts to boost domestic production through offshore exploration have so far yielded no results, leaving the country highly vulnerable to what happens in Venezuela. As a result, Cuba remains heavily involved in Venezuelan politics and is playing a critical role in negotiating a political settlement to deal with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's deteriorating health.
 
Venezuelan subsidies have made it possible for Cuba to remain economically isolated from the United States. Though a political shift now, while Venezuela is in crisis, may be impractical, there is a real danger that a Venezuelan government without Chavez will suddenly or gradually cease oil deliveries to Cuba. So despite the social dangers to the Cuban regime, an alternative economic management strategy is almost certainly under consideration.
 
It would therefore not be surprising if Cuba began to approach the United States far more seriously than it has in the past about reconciliation. But the United States will have to be willing to offer assurances that it will respect the pace of Cuba's careful economic opening and help protect Cuba from the political influence of expatriates wishing to return to the island. If common ground can be reached, Cuba could see an influx of investment -- in the tourism sector, but also potentially in ethanol -- and a spike in tourists that may help provide the surge in foreign exchange that Cuba would need to balance out a decline in Venezuelan assistance
.

Read more: The Challenges of a U.S.-Cuba Reconciliation | Stratfor

[Crafty_Dog]

When someone is killed in a civilized country and police slap around a witness and suppress evidence it is known as a cover-up. In Cuba it's called "reform." Viva Orwell.

Cuba's "ministry of truth" wants the world to believe that the Castro brothers are abandoning the use of state repression to maintain power. The Jay-Z-Beyoncé glam-tour of Old Havana last week was designed to help with the effort. But new details of the events surrounding theJuly 2012 deaths of prominent pacifist Oswaldo Payá—the winner of the European Parliament's 2002 Sakarov prize—and another dissident, Harold Cepero, suggest the opposite.

The U.S. press has reported on the March testimony of Ángel Carromero, the Spaniard who was driving the car that the two dissidents were riding in just before they died. Mr. Carromero was released from a Cuban prison in December and returned to Spain. He says that a red Lada had been tailing him and that the crash occurred because their car was rammed by another vehicle. He also claims that when he told this to Cuban authorities, they struck him, more than once.

But that's not the half of it. In an interview on Thursday at the Journal's offices, Payá's daughter, Rosa Maria, told me: "I must say that when I talked to Ángel, I didn't learn anything new. He confirmed things we already knew. We had the text message. We already knew that a car hit them from behind intentionally."

What she knew came straight from the mouth of Cuban police Capt. Fulgencio Medina, who took testimony from witnesses and read it aloud at the hospital in the eastern city of Bayamo where the victims were brought from the crash. Payá family friends were there, identified themselves as the family's representatives and reported by telephone back to Havana.

But the family was then denied access to that police report. The family was also denied the right to an independent autopsy, and they were told that all refrigeration chambers at all the hospitals in the area had broken down, so an autopsy had to be done immediately.

Doctors who were friends of the family were not allowed into the Bayamo hospital to inspect the body. The Payá family was denied a request for seats on a flight from Havana to Bayamo. The family has also been denied a copy of the autopsy report.

Putting Mr. Carromero on trial and hushing up the rest seemed like a tidy resolution. But the problem for the regime, says 24-year-old Ms. Payá, is "that in Cuba everyone talks."

The family has many friends in the Bayamo area and a few of those friends managed to get inside the hospital before the military locked it down; other sources who told them things seem to work there. "Our friends in the hospital talked a lot with the police in those first moments."

Ms. Payá says that the government never officially notified her family of the death of her father. But at the hospital Capt. Medina read the witness statements "in front of my friends and other cops and nurses, doctors."

The witnesses told of a red Lada, the same make and color of a suspicious car that Mr. Carromero described. They described seeing the occupants of the red Lada taking the foreigners [Mr. Carromero and Swedish politician Aaron Modig] out of their car almost immediately. The Spaniard was saying "Who are you? Why are you doing this to us?"

The statements did not say if Ms. Payá's father was "dead or alive," Ms. Payá told me. "But the witnesses said Harold [Cepero] was asking for help. I don't know if out loud or with his hands but they said he was touching his chest. So we know he was alive and conscious." Why then, Ms. Payá wants to know, did hospital personnel tell her family's friends that he was "brain dead," when they saw him lying on a gurney in a general area not receiving any form of intensive trauma care?

There is something else interesting about Capt. Medina's report of witness testimony, according to those who heard him read it: There was no mention of the car being smashed against a tree. This jibes with the testimony of the foreigners, who both have said that there was no crash with a tree.

Ms. Payá says that a journalist permitted to observe the trial on closed-circuit television told her that Capt. Medina testified against Mr. Carromero and never mentioned the red Lada or the questions witnesses had heard him ask as he was taken from the car.

This was supposed to be an open and shut case, with the emphasis on the shut. But now that the contradictions have become public knowledge, the regime's story is taking on a distinct odor. This is bad for the ministry of truth. Eight U.S. senators led by Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) have called for an investigation. Ms. Payá, who will return to Cuba next week, is worried about the safety of her family, and probably for good reason.

Write to O'Grady@wsj.com

[Crafty_Dog]

The Cuban Spy Network in the U.S. Government
May 2, 2013 | 1246 GMT
Stratfor
By Scott Stewart
Vice President of Analysis

On April 25, the U.S. government announced that it was unsealing an indictment charging Marta Rita Velazquez with conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Cuban government. Velazquez, a former attorney adviser at the U.S. Department of Transportation and a legal officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development, fled the United States for Sweden in 2002 and was indicted in 2004. Velazquez apparently selected Sweden because the country considers espionage to be a political offense, therefore it is not covered under its extradition treaty with the United States. She and her husband also lived in Sweden from 1998 to 2000, so the country was familiar to them.

Though the Velazquez indictment is several years old, it provides a detailed and fascinating account of Cuban espionage activity inside the United States. It also raises some significant implications about the daunting challenges facing American counterintelligence agencies.
The Story

According to the indictment, Velazquez was born in Puerto Rico. She graduated from Princeton University in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in political science and Latin American studies, obtained a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1982 and then received a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington in 1984. She was hired by the U.S. Department of Transportation in August 1984.

The U.S. government alleges that Velazquez was first recruited by the Cuban intelligence service in 1983 while a student at Johns Hopkins. She reportedly traveled from Washington to Mexico City where she met with a Cuban intelligence officer and was formally recruited as an agent. During her studies at Johns Hopkins, the government claims that Velazquez served as a spotter agent who helped the Cuban intelligence service identify, assess and recruit people who occupied sensitive national security positions or who had the potential to move into such positions in the future.

The indictment asserts that in this role, Velazquez identified and befriended Ana Belen Montes, a fellow student at Johns Hopkins, in 1984. In addition to their Puerto Rican heritage, the two students reportedly shared a strong disdain for the Reagan administration's policy toward Nicaragua's Sandinista regime. Velazquez reportedly told Montes that she had friends (the Cubans) who could help Montes in her desire to help the Nicaraguan people.

During the early 1980s, a left-wing movement developed in many American universities. The movement opposed Reagan's Central American policies, such as opposition to the Sandinistas, support for the Contra rebels and support of the regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. This movement was perhaps most readily seen in one of its larger and more active organizations, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. The movement radicalized some students who went on to work with Marxist groups in Latin America, such as Christine Lamont, who joined the Salvadoran Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, and Lori Berenson, who moved to Peru to join the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. According to the FBI, the Cuban intelligence service also recruited students like Velazquez and Montes from within this movement.

The indictment alleges that in the fall of 1984, while Montes was working as a clerk at the Department of Justice, Velazquez took her to New York to meet a friend who Velazquez said could provide Montes an opportunity to help the Nicaraguan people. The friend was an intelligence officer assigned to the Cuban mission to the United Nations. The women again traveled to New York together in early 1985 and met the Cuban intelligence officer a second time. He arranged for the two women to secretly travel together to Cuba via Spain.

In March of 1985, Velazquez and Montes traveled to Madrid, Spain, where they were met by a Cuban intelligence officer, who provided them with false passports and other documents. They then used these documents to travel to Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia. Once in Prague they were met by another Cuban intelligence officer who provided them with yet another set of false documents, as well as new sets of clothing. The Cuban officer they met in Prague then traveled with the women to Havana.

Once in Havana, the women reportedly received training in espionage tradecraft subjects, such as operational security and secure communications, including receiving and encrypting high frequency radio transmissions. The women were also allegedly subjected to practice polygraph examinations and taught methods to deceive polygraph operators.

Upon completion of their training, the women then returned to Madrid via Prague using their assumed identities. Once in Madrid they took tourist photographs of each other to support the story that they had been in Spain and then returned to Washington.

Upon returning to Washington, Montes applied for a job at the Defense Intelligence Agency using Velazquez as a character reference. She was hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency as an analyst in September 1985. Montes would excel at the agency and eventually became the Defense Intelligence Agency's most senior Cuba analyst. She served at that agency until the FBI arrested her in September 2001. Montes pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage charges in March 2002 and is currently serving a 25-year sentence.

Velazquez's trip to Havana with Montes occurred after she had been hired by the U.S. Department of Transportation in August 1984 and had been granted a Secret clearance in September 1984. In March 1989, Velazquez took a position as a legal adviser for Central America with the U.S. Agency for International Development. She was a regional legal adviser for the agency in Managua, Nicaragua, from 1990 to 1994, in Washington from 1994 to 1998 and in Guatemala City, Guatemala, from 2000 to 2002.

In June 2002, when it was announced that Montes had pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the U.S. government, Velazquez resigned from her position at the U.S. Agency for International Development and moved to Sweden, where she remains.
Cuban Intelligence

The Velazquez case, when studied in conjunction with those of Montes and Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, provides a fascinating window into the scope and nature of Cuban intelligence efforts inside the United States. With Velazquez at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Montes at the Defense Intelligence Agency and Myers in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Cubans had incredible coverage of the American government's foreign policy and intelligence community. Even after Montes was arrested and Velazquez fled to Sweden, Myers remained at the State Department until his retirement in 2007.

It is also quite interesting that all three of these cases are linked to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Velazquez and Montes were students in the program in the early 1980s, and Myers taught there until 1977, after receiving a Ph.D. from the school in 1972. He returned to the school following his retirement in 2007 and worked as a professor of European Studies until his arrest in June 2009. The school is a high-profile institution that has a proven track record of placing graduates in the American foreign affairs and intelligence communities -- and of hiring former government personnel to serve as professors. Still, it is not the only program with such a profile, and the Cubans would almost certainly have recruited a promising agent from Georgetown's Walsh School, Harvard's Kennedy School or any other program if provided the opportunity. The fact that there were three high-profile Cuban agents who penetrated the U.S. government and who were all associated with the School of Advanced International Studies would seem to be an incredible coincidence. The FBI is probably still looking for potential agents who Myers could have spotted for recruitment when they studied there from 2007 to 2009.

When considering espionage cases, we often refer to an old Soviet KGB Cold War acronym -- MICE -- to explain the motivations of spies. MICE stands for money, ideology, compromise and ego. Traditionally, money has proved to be the top motivation for Americans arrested for espionage, but as seen in the Velazquez, Montes and Myers cases, the Cubans were very successful in recruiting American agents using ideology. Like the Montes and Myers complaints, there is no indication in the Velazquez complaint that she had ever sought or accepted money from the Cuban intelligence service for her espionage activities. While Velazquez and Montes were both of Puerto Rican descent, Myers' recruitment shows that Cuban intelligence officers did not just confine their recruitment activity to Hispanics.

In addition to the Cuban preference for ideologically motivated agents, this case also shows that the Cuban intelligence service is very patient and is willing to wait years for the agents it recruits to move into sensitive positions within the U.S. government rather than just focus on immediate results. It took several years for Velazquez to get a job with access to Top Secret information. Although it must be recognized that this is often the case with ideologically motivated agents who are commonly recruited while students. It is also clear that Cuban espionage efforts against the United States did not end with the Cold War and continue to this day.   

Perhaps the most disturbing revelation from the Velazquez case for American counterintelligence officials, though, is the fact that Velazquez was not caught due to some operational mistake or intelligence coup. The only reason she was discovered is because of Montes' arrest and confession, which uncovered her activities. This means that her espionage tradecraft was solid for the nearly 18 years that she worked as a Cuban agent within the U.S. government. Furthermore, the background investigations conducted for the security clearances she held with the Department of Transportation and the Agency for International Development did not pick up on her anti-American sentiments -- even the "full field" investigation that would have been conducted prior to her being granted a Top Secret clearance. 

It is not surprising that the background investigations failed to uncover Velazquez's espionage activities. Background investigations often are seen as mundane tasks, and thus are not given high priority -- especially when there are so many other "real" cases to investigate. Furthermore, these investigations are most often done by contract investigators whose bureaucratic bosses emphasize speed over substance, meaning important leads are often ignored because of a case deadline. In fact, contractors who do attempt to dig deep are sometimes accused of trying to milk the system in an effort to acquire more points (the basis upon which contract investigators are paid) by running additional leads and interviewing additional people.

Quite frankly, when it comes to background investigations, the prevalent attitude is to do the minimum work necessary to check off the prerequisite boxes and get the investigation over as quickly -- and as superficially -- as possible. Background investigations have become perfunctory bureaucratic processes that lack the ability to uncover the type of information required to catch a spy who does not want to be caught. 

Velazquez would not have been required to pass a polygraph at the U.S. Agency for International Development like Montes had to at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Nevertheless, the portion of the indictment that discussed the training in deceiving the polygraph that Velazquez and Montes received during their first trip to Cuba underscores the limitation of polygraph examinations -– they only work really well on honest people.

Finally, it is interesting to look at these Cuban cases in light of what they may tell us about the larger challenges facing U.S. counterintelligence officials. If a small, poor nation like Cuba can successfully recruit so many agents and place them in critical positions within the U.S. government for so long, what does this portend about the efforts and successes of larger or richer countries with aggressive intelligence agencies like China, Russia, Israel and India?

Read more: The Cuban Spy Network in the U.S. Government | Stratfor

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/lost-world-part-I

[Crafty_Dog]

 Unusual Social Unrest in Cuba
Analysis
January 30, 2014 | 0532 Print Text Size
Unusual But Manageable Protests in Cuba
Fruit and vegetable vendors at a market in Havana in August 2013. (ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty Images)
Summary

Two unusual instances of protests by private vendors in Cuba are a security concern for the island's leaders. The demonstrations likely occurred because Cuba began enforcing recently approved laws to regulate the island's nascent small businesses. The government cannot suppress these protests as easily as those instigated by political groups because the protesters seemingly do not have an organizational structure that authorities can simply infiltrate.

For now, it is unclear whether established political dissidents will be able to co-opt growing economic frustration. However, as the government continues to manage a complex campaign to slowly incorporate private economic activity into the economic system, there will continue to be pressure on the relationship between private entrepreneurs and the government. This natural tension will create further opportunities for public unrest, but the Cuban government will be proactive in its efforts to prevent a repeat of recent protests.

Analysis

Several reports from media outside Cuba suggest that two notable instances of social unrest occurred when private vendors marched in separate protests in the Cuban cities of Holguin and Santa Clara. In Holguin, at least 100 vendors protested Jan. 21 near the municipal headquarters after municipal employees reportedly seized unspecified goods the vendors were selling in a public plaza. The Miami Herald claimed that the protesters threw rocks at police officers who came to disperse them. Marti Noticias reported Jan. 24 that 50 vendors selling wares near a hospital protested after being given 24 hours' notice to vacate an open-air market. Additionally, news site Cubanet released an unconfirmed report in October 2013 that claimed that vendors intended to hold a similar protest in Havana last November but that the government's security services thwarted it.

The reported protests are unusual because they involve vendors from the country's small businesses instead of the political opposition. Members of Cuba's anti-government political organizations frequently protest across the country, but protests that seemingly do not involve political dissidents are rare. However, Cuba's evolving economic management strategy is creating new social tensions, and though they were small, these two protests may herald a larger shift in public support for Cuban authorities.
The Cause of the Protests

The reason behind the protests seems to be the Cuban government's push to regulate the country's growing small businesses. Such enterprises expanded after Cuban President Raul Castro approved economic reforms in 2010 that allowed Cubans to legally own small businesses. Much of Cuba's previously illicit informal economy of private restaurants, small hotels and vendors registered with government authorities after Castro's decision. However, the rapid reform also created extensive areas of unregulated economic activity outside the state's control.



At the same time, however, illicit businesses have arisen alongside the newly licit. Local media reports have documented increased smuggling of goods from abroad for sale in Cuba. Others are reselling goods bought in state stores, and still others have continued to operate without government licenses and paying no taxes. Some firms were authorized to perform one specific economic activity but used the license to sell other services altogether -- licensed restaurants showing movies, for example. To counter this behavior, the government passed several laws regulating all private entrepreneurs legalized in the 2010 reforms.

New regulatory legislation that took effect in January sanctions most of the offenses reportedly committed by private businesses. The laws list the types of economic activity permitted by the state and the punishments for engaging in outlawed forms of business. The punishments prescribed by the laws range from verbal warnings to fines or imprisonment. According to Marti Noticias, municipal authorities enforcing some sanctions in these reforms sparked the Santa Clara protest.
Security Response

The protests present an unusual challenge for the Cuban government. Unlike the country's political groups, which tend to protest because of ideological opposition to the Castro government, private sector workers likely protested because the new laws threaten their livelihood. With these policies being enforced countrywide, there is a good chance that new sources of tensions between the public and the government are occurring throughout the island. Even when faced with the possibility of more unrest, the government cannot simply halt its enforcement of the laws and allow the private sector to grow unchecked. This dynamic is likely to cause further protests, and the government will use all its tools, including propaganda, intelligence assets and security forces, against them.

The Cuban government will direct its powerful security organizations against individuals and groups planning future protests. Its Intelligence Directorate maintains tight surveillance over opponents in the country, and the Interior Ministry and police forces traditionally have not hesitated to break up protests. Cuba appears in recent weeks to have relied on these security bodies to disrupt any planned demonstrations by private workers, and it will continue to do so. According to an opposition news site, police arrested 19 dissidents in Holguin after the Jan. 21 protest. Dozens of political opponents were also detained in Havana prior to a Latin American leaders' summit held Jan. 25-29. These measures will likely avert any widespread protest activity but cannot completely eliminate outbreaks of dissent.

The protests are not an immediate threat to the Cuban government, but it cannot afford to ignore them. With the country gradually preparing for a political transition, the leadership will attempt to forestall any complications, including domestic unrest. Because the protests involved only a few hundred people, they are unlikely to overwhelm Cuba's security apparatus. Therefore, further crackdowns on political groups and potential protesters can be expected.

Read more: Unusual Social Unrest in Cuba | Stratfor

[Crafty_Dog]

See #387 et seq

http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1024.350

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/18/rand-paul-opening-up-cuba-probably-a-good-idea/

[Crafty_Dog]

By
Peggy Noonan









 Dec. 18, 2014 6:49 p.m. ET
187 COMMENTS

If a change in policy is in the American national interest, then it is a good idea. If it is not, then it is a bad idea, and something we should not do.

In another era that would be so obvious as not to bear repeating. But seeing to our national interests (just as we expect other nations to see to theirs) has been rather lost along the way by our leaders the past dozen years, and now sounds almost touchingly quaint.

But with that guiding principle, some questions on establishing new and closer ties with Cuba:

Was it ever in our nation’s interests to have, 90 miles off our shore, an avowed and active enemy?
 
No.
 
Is it now in our nation’s interests to have, 90 miles off our shore, an avowed and active enemy?
 
No.
 
Is it in the national interest to attempt to change this circumstance, if only gradually and hopefully, but with a sense that breaking the status quo might yield rewards?

Yes. If the new policy succeeds and leaves an old foe less active and avowed we will be better off, and it’s always possible, life being surprising, that we’ll be much better off. If the policy fails we’ll be no worse off than we were and can revert back to the old order, yanking out our embassy and re-erecting old barriers.

Great nations are like people. We get in habits of affection and enmity. What is needed is a practice of detached realism. Sometimes those for whom you have affection are disappointing. Sometimes those toward whom you feel enmity are, you realize, an essentially defeated foe, and a new attitude might be constructive. The key is to keep eyes sharp for changed situations, and adapt.

Fidel Castro is a bad man who took an almost-paradise and turned it into a floating prison. In replacing a dictatorship whose corruption was happily leavened by incompetence, he created a communist totalitarian state that made everything in his country worse. He robbed it of wealth, beauty and potential freedom. He was also a thorn and a threat to the United States, which he hated and moved against in myriad ways. He did all this for more than half a century.

Soon he will die, and his brother supposedly has taken his place. That is a changed situation.
 
Normalizing relations with Cuba will not, as Sen. Marco Rubio passionately put it in these pages, grant the Castro regime “legitimacy.”

Nothing can grant it legitimacy.

Fidel Castro ruined his country for a dead ideology and the whole world knows it. It may be closer to the truth to see the Castro brothers’ eagerness for normalization as an admission that they’re run out their string. They’ve lost everything that kept them alive, from the Soviet Union to once-oil-rich Venezuela. The Castro government is stuck. Their economy is nothing. They have no strength. They enjoy vestigial respect from certain quarters, but only vestigial. They’ve lost and they know it.
 
So why not move now?

Nothing magical will immediately follow normalization. The Castro brothers will not say, “I can’t believe it, free markets and democracy really are better, I had no idea!” Nothing will make Cuba democratic overnight. But American involvement and presence—American tourists and businessmen, American diplomats, American money, American ways and technology—will likely in time have a freeing effect. With increased contact a certain amount of good feeling will build. And that could make Cuba, within a generation or even less, a friend.
 
And that would be good for the American national interest, because it’s better to have a friend 90 miles away than an active and avowed enemy.

The opening to Cuba may also spark a re-Christianizing effect among a people who’ve been denied freedom of religious worship for generations. That would be good too, for them and us.
 
There is no reason to believe increased engagement between America and Cuba would encourage a post-Castro government to be more antagonistic or aggressive toward the U.S. More movement and commerce, including media presence, will not give that government more motive to embarrass itself by abusing and oppressing its people. As for the military, it wouldn’t be long, with lifted embargoes, before captains in the Cuban army found out what managers in the new Hilton were making, and jumped into hotel services.
 
With a real opening, including lifted embargoes, all the pressure year by year would be toward more back-and-forth, greater prosperity, and more freedom squeaking in by Internet and television.

In a rising Cuba all the pressure will be toward freedom. It will not be toward dictatorship.

In America, attention has rightly been paid to the Cuban-Americans of Florida and their reaction. They were cruelly displaced by the communist regime and forced to flee Cuba. They lost everything, came here penniless, and through gifts and guts rose to economic and political power. The oldest, who came in 1960, feel bitterness—and are loyal to that bitterness. Their children, a little less so, and the next generation less still. Because everything changes. You can’t let a foreign policy be governed by bitterness even when that bitterness is legitimate. Advice to the U.S. government: Attempt in time to create some kind of U.S.-Cuban framework whereby those whose property was expropriated can reclaim it.

President Obama’s opening seems so far cleverly done and well wired. He has major cover from the involvement of the most popular pope in recorded history, and also from the government of Canada, an ever-popular country whose prime minister, the sturdy, steady Stephen Harper , is the most quietly effective head of government in the Northern Hemisphere.
 
It is to be stipulated that the particulars of the deal will prove, on inspection, to be unimpressive, because Mr Obama was the negotiator. Fair enough, but he said when he first ran for president, in 2008, that he hoped for a new kind of engagement with Cuba, and he is producing it.

Something to watch out for: When an administration goes all in on a controversial policy it tends to spend most of its follow-up time not making sure the policy works but proving, through occasionally specious data and assertions, that it was the right policy. All who judge how the new opening proceeds will have to factor that in and see past it.

A closing note: I always thought, life often being unfair, that Fidel Castro would die the death of a happy monster, old, in bed, a cigar jutting out from the pillows, a brandy on the bedside table. My dream the past few years was that this tranquil end would be disturbed by this scene: American tourists jumping up and down outside his window, snapping pictures on their smartphones. American tourists flooding the island, befriending his people, doing business with them, showing in their attitude and through a million conversations which system is, actually, preferable. Castro sees them through the window. He grits his teeth so hard the cigar snaps off. Money and sentiment defeat his life’s work. He leaves the world knowing that in history’s great game, he lost.
 
Open the doors, let America flood the zone and snap those pictures. “Fidel! Look this way!” Snap. Flash. Gone.

[G M]

Bill Ayers is very happy and very proud.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/12/19/rand-paul-just-blasted-marco-rubio-in-a-very-public-way/

[Crafty_Dog]

Castro Wins

I’m more on the fence about Obama’s unilateral decision to end as much of the Cuban embargo as he can manage (most of the sanctions require Congress’s approval to dismantle). I’ve long been open to the idea that the embargo should be lifted. I don’t think the Castro regime would be able to long withstand the gales of the global economy, and it’s entirely possible we will see a “Cuban Spring” shortly after the Castros finally go to Hell. (The funny part is that it will probably take them a while to realize it’s Hell given the similar policy -- and meteorological -- arrangements. “Socialism only works in two places,” Ronald Reagan famously said. “Heaven where they don’t need it and hell where they already have it.”)

It’s certainly true that the embargo has failed to get rid of the Castros -- a valuable and apparently un-learnable lesson for people who think that sanctions are a reliable tool for bending other countries to our will. But sometimes a policy that is implemented for one reason becomes useful for other reasons. When the Castros kick the bucket there will be an opportunity to exert leverage over the new leaders -- or at least there would have been. This is Marco Rubio’s point, and I think it’s a good one.

Obama went another way. It’s pretty clear that he wanted to lift the embargo without any serious conditions at all. Obama’s motivations are not hard to fathom. Ideologically, anything that smacks of the Cold War is an embarrassment to Obama. Politically, he’s like a Black Friday shopaholic throwing any legacy items in his cart he can put his hands on. Amnesty for illegal immigrants . . . end Cuba’s isolation . . . George Foreman Grill . . . whatever will fit in the cart will do.

Obama had a political problem in that Alan Gross was rotting in a Cuban dungeon. So it’s not quite right to say that Obama traded the store for one man, it’s that that one man got in the way of him simply giving the store away no strings attached.

Yes, part of my reluctance stems from spite. I hate Fidel Castro and all he represents. Doing this the day after Castro went down for the dirt nap would have been emotionally more acceptable to me. Giving the Castro the sense that he won bothers me. But more important than even my own sense of spite, waiting until the Castros moved on would have struck a terrible blow to Castroism. And that actually matters, not just in Cuba but beyond. Castro is loved by dictators and the like because he’s a symbol of defiance to the U.S. By blinking first, we not only lend power to the cult of Castro, we send the signal that we can be waited out. No doubt Iran is finding some encouragement here.

Personally, I think there are a lot of problems with the comparisons people on the left and the right are making between Cuba and China. The Left says if we could open to China, we should be able to open to Cuba. But Nixon didn’t go to China to help democratize it. He went to China to create a wedge with the Soviets. The Right says all of the arguments against engaging dictatorial Cuba should also apply to China. After all, China hasn’t democratized. Well, yes and no. I do think China has grown more free, and obviously more prosperous, since it opened to the West. But it’s still an authoritarian regime and the rulers are in many ways more powerful than ever. This argument is true enough (and a useful counter-example for those who think lifting the embargo will make Cuba free). My only objection is that Cuba and China are very different entities and any serious foreign policy has to be able to make distinctions between a huge nuclear power and a crappy Caribbean backwater.

But, hey, let’s say it all works out. Let’s say that the policy of constructive engagement -- so vilified by the Left when applied to South Africa -- succeeds beyond our wildest dreams in Cuba. Let’s say the place becomes rich, technologically advanced, and bourgeois in the blink of an eye. The people get their modern cars and Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. Moreover, let’s assume that, post-Castro, the country becomes democratic, or at least democratizing. In short, let’s say everything Democrats (and some more committed leftists) say they want to happen in Cuba actually happens. What then? Well, here’s my prediction: Then the Left will start to hate Cuba.

In no time, we will start seeing wistful stories in the New York Times about the “lost” Cuba, when things were simpler and life’s pleasures were attained outside of grubby commerce and filthy lucre. Suddenly we will hear about the persistent problem of Cuban racism -- long on display, but ignored, in the lily-white upper echelons of the Cuban Communist Party. Nostalgia for a new “Old Havana,” where the lines were long, but the hearts were full, will erupt across Park Slope and Takoma Park. The Nation will run mournful memoirs and polemics from Naomi Klein or Naomi Wolf or some other person named Naomi, about the brutal alienation that capitalism brings. And I will laugh at them.

Oh, Don’t Forget

You do know that Castro is a fascist, right? Well, maybe not explicitly in his doctrine. But in nearly everything else, he fits the bill. Militarist? The guy uses the army to rule the country and has worn the same dingy army uniform for half a century. Nationalist? Check. Cult of Personality? Double check! Rhetorical defiance of the “international system”? That’s his bag, baby (just as it was Mussolini’s). It’s worth remembering that Castro loved Francisco Franco. When Franco died, Castro declared a national day of mourning (actually, it might have been three days of mourning). Whenever leftists try to tell me what a fascist dictator looks like, I always like to ask, “How does that differ from Castro?”

It’s rare that I get a good answer.

Some of you might remember Herbert Matthews. You know National Review’s long running joke about Castro “getting his job through the New York Times”? That was based on Herbert Matthews’s reporting. Matthews was a sucker for Castro and he let himself be played for one. Funnily enough, 30 years earlier, he was a sucker for Mussolini too.

[DougMacG]

"Is it in the national interest to attempt to change this circumstance, if only gradually and hopefully, but with a sense that breaking the status quo might yield rewards?

Yes. If the new policy succeeds and leaves an old foe less active and avowed we will be better off, and it’s always possible, life being surprising, that we’ll be much better off. If the policy fails we’ll be no worse off than we were and can revert back to the old order, yanking out our embassy and re-erecting old barriers."

   - No, it removes our only policy lever at the time when it finally could be used.
...

"Normalizing relations with Cuba will not, as Sen. Marco Rubio passionately put it in these pages, grant the Castro regime “legitimacy.”   Nothing can grant it legitimacy."

   - Yes it does grant it an element of legitimacy.  These rogue leaders LOVE to be seen with world leaders and speaking with legitimacy at the UN, etc.  How about a State dinner for these thugs?  Instead they will dress casually, share a few toasts and say it wasn't one.
...

"So why not move now?"

   - One reason is that we are a nation of laws that originate in Congress and not a nation with a King or dictator.  Another reason is that acting now precludes us from doing this when these thugs die and give up power.


"Nothing magical will immediately follow normalization. The Castro brothers will not say, “I can’t believe it, free markets and democracy really are better, I had no idea!” Nothing will make Cuba democratic overnight. But American involvement and presence—American tourists and businessmen, American diplomats, American money, American ways and technology—will likely in time have a freeing effect. With increased contact a certain amount of good feeling will build. And that could make Cuba, within a generation or even less, a friend.

   - We are doing fine with the Cuban people.  They're still floating boats to here and taking refuge.  But the money will go to the regime.  What part of communist dictatorship is she not understanding?  How about under "normalization" we send the protestors there to demand free elections now?  If that was the plan, he could probably get Rubio's support.


"The opening to Cuba may also spark a re-Christianizing effect among a people who’ve been denied freedom of religious worship for generations. That would be good too, for them and us."

   - Again, what part of communist, totalitarian dictatorship is she not understanding?  Take this through Congress and couple it with at least some empty, public promises toward democracy and freedom that we can later seek to hold them to.  Not just reward them for a half century of total oppression.

[Crafty_Dog]

On Christmas break 1980-81 (IIRC) I was in Cuba for nine days legally and openly as part of a trip organized via the Columbia Law School Society of International Law, on the board of which I sat.  We flew directly from Miami to Havana.

This was a couple of months before what was to become the Port Mariel exodus (seen in the opening sequence of the Pacino version of "Scarface") which, unknown to most here in the US, was an outgrowth of events at the Peruvian Embassy granting asylum to thousands of Cubans.   Some of us in the group managed to break away from the daily Potemkin tours to which we were being subjected and the "supervision" of the Committees for the Defense of the Revoluation (neighborhood spies for the Communist Party) and mingle with people.

There was a very strong sense of ferment in the air, which people attributed to the visits the year before that had been allowed by family members who had fled to the US in 1960.   The Castro regime had taught about the terrible oppression of the Cubans in Amerika, but the conversations with their visiting family members put lie to it.  Indeed, the Cuban-Americans, seeing that the Cubans got only one pair of pants and one pair of shoes a year, left all their clothes and shoes behind with "Don't worry!  We have lots more at home!  Their well-fed appearance also contrasted with the Cubans, who got one kilo of meat a month.

This, IMHO is why when the incident at the Peruvian Embassy went off, so many people were ready to jump in an instant.  (Maybe GM can use his google fu to bring up the history here).

The general concept of undermining Castro Communism with interaction is not, IMHO, inherently unsound.  What IS unsound, is the pathetic way in which Obama is going about it.

[DougMacG]

"The general concept of undermining Castro Communism with interaction is not, IMHO, inherently unsound.  What IS unsound, is the pathetic way in which Obama is going about it."

That's right.  The point IS to undermine the regime.  It is not about us needing another island to visit or a better cigar to smoke.  The total oppression of the people there is wrong (understatement!) and we have only one lever available to us, assuming we are unwilling or unable to help in any other way.  If Obama's opening is part of a full court campaign to undermine and end the regime, great.  Now show us the rest of it. 

We were discussing this subject on the Presidential 2016 thread.  Marco Rubio is hellbent on seeing this regime end.  After 8 years of a Rubio Presidency if we are so lucky, 10 years from now, both Castros will be dead from old age, Cuba will be a beautiful, free country, and holding out the carrot of free trade and other help from the US will play a role in that.  Why give the perks of our freedom to this regime; give it to the people!
-------------------------------

Some source links from a post in the Presidential thread:

Rubio previously on Cuba and Venezuela (Feb 2014):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_wKhXurFyI

Maybe this will help clarify Rubio's view, a 14 minute radio interview with John Hinderaker (12/23/14):
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/marco-rubio-on-cuba.php

A Cuban exile writes in the Washington Post today:  Betrayed by President Obama
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/22/as-a-cuban-exile-i-feel-betrayed-by-president-obama/

Recent News:  Cuban Government Sinks Boat Carrying 32 Refugees, Including Children
The boat, said González, was carrying 32 people, including seven women and two children. One of the two children was her 8-year-old son.  Her husband is still missing.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article4711515.html
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2014/12/23/cuban-government-sinks-boat-carrying-32-refugees-including-children/
Did anyone see that story?

(Doug)  When Marco Rubio speaks passionately and in great detail about just how awful the Cuban regime is, is anyone saying that any of it is not true??

No.  We are just tired of taking a stand. 

Free trade is something you do with free people.  Enriching enemies of the United States with either money or technology was illegal when I was in the export business.  I fully support free trade but understand that caveat.
-------------------------------------------

If free trade with the US was what the Castros feared and opposed, then that is what we should be throwing at them.  Instead we are giving them the lifeline they need to survive, just when they need it, for no concession in return, right while both of their sugar daddies, Venezuela and Russia, are being squeezed to death in the oil price collapse.

To Obama, the timing is all about HIM!

[G M]

http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/cuba-refugees-peruvian-embassy-9919806

[Crafty_Dog]

Thank you GM!

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-nylons-for-nothing/2015/01/01/babeaf84-912b-11e4-a412-4b735edc7175_story.html?wprss=rss_charles-krauthammer

[Crafty_Dog]

U.S. Easing Decades-Old Restrictions on Travel to Cuba
The United States government on Friday will begin making it easier for Americans to travel to Cuba than it has been for more than half a century, opening the door to a new era of contact between neighbors that have been estranged longer than most of their citizens have been alive.
The Obama administration announced on Thursday a set of new regulations to take effect on Friday easing decades-old restrictions on travel, business and remittances, putting into reality some of the changes promised by President Obama last month when he announced plans to resume normal diplomatic relations with Havana.
Under the new regulations, Americans will now be allowed to travel to Cuba for any of a dozen specific reasons without first obtaining a special license from the government. Airlines and travel agents will be allowed to provide service to Cuba without a specific license. And travelers will be permitted to use credit cards and spend money while in the country and bring back up to $400 in souvenirs, including up to $100 in alcohol or tobacco.
The new regulations will also make it easier for American telecommunications providers and financial institutions to do business with Cuba. Americans will be allowed to send more money to Cubans, up to $2,000 every three months instead of the $500 currently permitted.
“These changes will have a direct impact in further engaging and empowering the Cuban people, promoting positive change for Cuba’s citizens,” Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew, whose department oversees sanctions policy, said in a statement.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/world/americas/us-eases-decades-old-rules-on-travel-to-cuba.html?emc=edit_na_20150115

[ccp]

Medicare fraud is huge in Miami.   I don't know how much of it is from Cubans but I believe a substantial portion is.   

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/plundering-america-cubas-criminal-pipeline-exploits-us-laws/ar-AA8cShd

[DougMacG]

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article8520950.html

"Cuban President Raul Castro demanded on Wednesday that the United States return the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, lift the half-century trade embargo on Cuba and compensate his country for damages before the two nations re-establish normal relations."
-----------------------------------

As a student of contract law, I point out that any counteroffer is a rejection of Obama's offer of normalization, and makes the original offer no longer valid or binding.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offer_and_acceptance

What a joke, Barack Obama and Raul Castro negotiating what is in the best interests of their countries.  If this wasn't real, it would make a good SNL skit - without help from comedy writers.

[ccp]

JayZ promised Brock some kickbacks in his plan to do business in Cuba.

The JayZ cigar company.

[Crafty_Dog]

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Guantanamo Bay's Place in U.S. Strategy in the Caribbean
Geopolitical Weekly
February 3, 2015 | 09:03 GMT Print Text Size
Stratfor

By Sim Tack

Last week, the Cuban government declared that for the United States and Cuba to normalize relations, the United States would have to return the territory occupied by a U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Washington clearly responded that returning the base is not on the table right now. This response makes sense, since quite a bit of politicking goes into the status of the base. However, the Guantanamo Bay issue highlights a notable aspect to the U.S.-Cuban negotiations — one that is rooted in the history of the U.S. ascension to superpower status as it challenged European powers in the Western Hemisphere.
U.S. Expansion in the Western Hemisphere

Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean, has a prominent position at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, separating access to the gulf into two choke points: the Yucatan Channel and the Straits of Florida. It is also situated on the sea-lanes between the U.S. East Coast and the Panama Canal, the shortest route for naval traffic between the two coasts of the United States. Cuba thus has been pivotal to the U.S. strategy to safeguard economic activity in the Gulf of Mexico and naval transport routes beyond that. The evolution of U.S. naval capabilities, however, has changed the part that Cuba, and thus the base at Guantanamo, has played.

The United States began extending its ambitions into the Caribbean, challenging the classical European colonial powers and arguably starting its ascent to the rank of a global power, with the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. Named after then-President James Monroe, the doctrine sought to prevent intervention by European powers — most notably Spain and Portugal — in their former colonies as the colonies achieved independence. The doctrine largely was a hollow statement at first because the United States did not have the naval power it would need to enforce it and establish the hegemony that it sought to put in place with the doctrine. However, the United Kingdom, which at the time had considerable naval capabilities, supported the Monroe Doctrine and committed to enforcing it because it also secured British access to the markets in these former colonies as long as they were not recovered by their former rulers.

Although it was a notable shift in U.S. foreign policy toward the Western Hemisphere as a whole, the Monroe Doctrine did not affect Cuba directly. The doctrine did not seek to meddle in the affairs of existing European colonies, and the Spanish ruled Cuba and Puerto Rico until the Spanish-American War in 1898. At that point, after the Monroe Doctrine had set the stage, U.S. military capabilities were catching up with its foreign policy intent. It was during the Spanish-American War that U.S. naval power entered the global stage and eventually resulted in the United States' taking Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from Spain.

However, Washington first needed a reason for intervention in Cuba. That opportunity came with the USS Maine explosion. The ship was deployed to Havana to protect U.S. business interests on the island. Moreover, news was spreading of atrocities committed by Spanish forces against the Cuban population. This intervention included the exact moment when U.S. forces arrived in Guantanamo Bay. In June 1898, a battalion of Marines landed at Fisherman's Point in the Bay of Guantanamo to pin down the Spanish forces in the city of Guantanamo, preventing them from reinforcing the Spanish positions on San Juan Hill as Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders led the charge there.

Several years after the U.S. victory against the Spanish, in 1903, the newly independent Cuban government signed an agreement with Washington for the perpetual lease of Guantanamo Bay as a naval base. Initially, the peace agreement with Spain had transferred sovereignty over the island to the United States, but Washington decided to leave the island under the control of the local Cuban leaders who had started the rebellion against the Spanish. The U.S. naval station at Guantanamo, the result of the first real show of U.S. expeditionary power, went on to become instrumental in the further deployment of U.S. naval power. In those days, the time that naval vessels spent at sea was limited significantly by the fuel they required: coal. Having access to forward deployed coaling stations such as the one at Guantanamo extended the U.S. Navy's ability to operate in the Caribbean.
Guantanamo's Changing Role

After World War II, during which Guantanamo also played a direct part in supporting merchant shipping convoys from the U.S. East Coast, the role of Guantanamo Bay changed considerably as a consequence of the Cuban Revolution. Throughout the revolution, Guantanamo Bay not only became a key element of U.S. resistance to the rebels led by Fidel Castro, it also became a pawn in the new bipolar world order pitting the United States against the Soviet Union. The relations between the new Cuban government and the Soviet Union made Cuba the Soviets' most forward position toward the continental United States — something made very obvious during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The naval base at Guantanamo did not necessarily play a leading role in this part of history, although the continued U.S. presence in Guantanamo Bay persisted as a major source of dispute between Washington and Havana.

After the Cold War, the base's military significance began to wane. The fall of the Soviet Union left Cuba a much less significant element in U.S. foreign policy, and the development of new technology had reduced the need for the base to support U.S. naval operations in the Caribbean. As much as geopolitics dictates history, the evolution of manmade technology can significantly alter states' physical limitations and capabilities. The use of new and more efficient fuels in naval vessels improved the range and speed of these vessels to the point where the Gulf of Mexico's security and naval movement beyond the U.S. coastline no longer required a logistical support node in Cuba.

The U.S. Navy continued using Guantanamo as a training ground, but the base's significance even in this regard evaporated. By the mid-1990s, activity at the naval base at Guantanamo was demoted to Minimum Pillar Performance (limiting the activities and presence there to only that which is necessary to maintain the existence of the facilities). The U.S. military has maintained this caretaker presence at Guantanamo, but it has done so mostly in the service of the State Department, which intends to retain Guantanamo as a bargaining chip or leverage in relations with Havana, rather than out of military need.

The United States also realized that other similar naval operating bases in Latin America lost their utility in a new geopolitical and technological reality. During World War II, the United States had established such a base in Rio de Janeiro, but after the war this base closed, having served its military purpose. Similarly, the United States managed a series of naval bases throughout former British territories in the Western Hemisphere that it obtained in return for 50 Town-class destroyers through the lend-lease agreement with London. Most of these bases also were shut down shortly after World War II or during the Cold War. The United States intends to use its forward deploying military capabilities without establishing full-blown bases, as seen in Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East, but even then Guantanamo falls outside of Washington's "places-not-bases" intent.

A new use for the base was discovered after 9/11, when it became host to a detention facility holding suspected terrorists. The ambiguous legal status of the base at Guantanamo Bay provided grounds for this sort of use because it is technically a base leased by the U.S. government located on foreign soil. Terrorism suspects are not subject to the same guarantees they would receive if held on sovereign U.S. soil, generating a useful dynamic in the complex issue of dealing with enemy combatants in the U.S.-jihadist war. Guantanamo served a similar purpose when it was used to hold HIV-positive refugees in the early 1990s.

The potential for Guantanamo Bay to be returned to Cuba will depend greatly on the negotiations between Washington and Havana, as well as the domestic U.S. politicking that is influenced significantly by the anti-Castro Cuban immigrant population of Florida, a swing state that is key in presidential elections. It is key, however, to see Guantanamo in its current context and not in its past role in the development and protection of U.S. power in the Caribbean and beyond. The part Guantanamo plays in U.S.-Cuba negotiations is defined by Washington's desire to play this card at will. The only constraint on Washington is the requirement to disband the detention camp at Guantanamo to accommodate Cuba's demands, though this does not mean that the United States will give up the naval base easily. Once played, the Guantanamo card will be gone and Washington's long-term leverage over Havana will be forever altered.

[Crafty_Dog]

 The Geopolitics of U.S.-Cuba Relations
Geopolitical Weekly
December 23, 2014 | 09:00 GMT
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By George Friedman

Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro agreed to an exchange of prisoners being held on espionage charges. In addition, Washington and Havana agreed to hold discussions with the goal of establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries. No agreement was reached on ending the U.S. embargo on Cuba, a step that requires congressional approval.

It was a modest agreement, striking only because there was any agreement at all. U.S.-Cuba relations had been frozen for decades, with neither side prepared to make significant concessions or even first moves. The cause was partly the domestic politics of each country that made it easier to leave the relationship frozen. On the American side, a coalition of Cuban-Americans, conservatives and human rights advocates decrying Cuba's record of human rights violations blocked the effort. On the Cuban side, enmity with the United States plays a pivotal role in legitimizing the communist regime. Not only was the government born out of opposition to American imperialism, but Havana also uses the ongoing U.S. embargo to explain Cuban economic failures. There was no external pressure compelling either side to accommodate the other, and there were substantial internal reasons to let the situation stay as it is.

The Cubans are now under some pressure to shift their policies. They have managed to survive the fall of the Soviet Union with some difficulty. They now face a more immediate problem: uncertainty in Venezuela. Caracas supplies oil to Cuba at deeply discounted prices. It is hard to tell just how close Cuba's economy is to the edge, but there is no question that Venezuelan oil makes a significant difference. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government is facing mounting unrest over economic failures. If the Venezuelan government falls, Cuba would lose one of its structural supports. Venezuela's fate is far from certain, but Cuba must face the possibility of a worst-case scenario and shape openings. Opening to the United States makes sense in terms of regime preservation.

The U.S. reason for the shift is less clear. It makes political sense from Obama's standpoint. First, ideologically, ending the embargo appeals to him. Second, he has few foreign policy successes to his credit. Normalizing relations with Cuba is something he might be able to achieve, since groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce favor normalization and will provide political cover in the Republican Party. But finally, and perhaps most important, the geopolitical foundations behind the American obsession with Cuba have for the most part evaporated, if not permanently than at least for the foreseeable future. Normalization of relations with Cuba no longer poses a strategic threat. To understand the U.S. response to Cuba in the past half century, understanding Cuba's geopolitical challenge to the United States is important.
Cuba's Strategic Value

The challenge dates back to the completion of the Louisiana Purchase by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803. The Territory of Louisiana had been owned by Spain for most of its history until it was ceded to France a few years before Napoleon sold it to the United States to help fund his war with the British. Jefferson saw Louisiana as essential to American national security in two ways: First, the U.S. population at the time was located primarily east of the Appalachians in a long strip running from New England to the Georgia-Florida border. It was extremely vulnerable to invasion with little room to retreat, as became evident in the War of 1812. Second, Jefferson had a vision of American prosperity built around farmers owning their own land, living as entrepreneurs rather than as serfs. Louisiana's rich land, in the hands of immigrants to the United States, would generate the wealth that would build the country and provide the strategic depth to secure it.

What made Louisiana valuable was its river structure that would allow Midwestern farmers to ship their produce in barges to the Mississippi River and onward down to New Orleans. There the grain would be transferred to oceangoing vessels and shipped to Europe. This grain would make the Industrial Revolution possible in Britain, because the imports of mass quantities of food freed British farmers to work in urban industries.

In order for this to work, the United States needed to control the Ohio-Missouri-Mississippi river complex (including numerous other rivers), the mouth of the Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico, and the exits into the Atlantic that ran between Cuba and Florida and between Cuba and Mexico. If this supply chain were broken at any point, the global consequences — and particularly the consequences for the United States — would be substantial. New Orleans remains the largest port for bulk shipments in the United States, still shipping grain to Europe and importing steel for American production.

For the Spaniards, the Louisiana Territory was a shield against U.S. incursions into Mexico and its rich silver mines, which provided a substantial portion of Spanish wealth. With Louisiana in American hands, these critical holdings were threatened. From the American point of view, Spain's concern raised the possibility of Spanish interference with American trade. With Florida, Cuba and the Yucatan in Spanish hands, the Spaniards had the potential to interdict the flow of produce down the Mississippi.

Former President Andrew Jackson played the key role in Jeffersonian strategy. As a general, he waged the wars against the Seminole Indians in Florida and seized the territory from Spanish rule — and from the Seminoles. He defended New Orleans from British attack in 1814. When he became president, he saw that Mexico, now independent from Spain, represented the primary threat to the entire enterprise of mid-America. The border of Mexican Texas was on the Sabine River, only 193 kilometers (120 miles) from the Mississippi. Jackson, through his agent Sam Houston, encouraged a rising in Texas against the Mexicans that set the stage for annexation.

But Spanish Cuba remained the thorn in the side of the United States. The Florida and Yucatan straits were narrow. Although the Spaniards, even in their weakened state, might have been able to block U.S. trade routes, it was the British who worried the Americans most. Based in the Bahamas, near Cuba, the British, of many conflicting minds on the United States, could seize Cuba and impose an almost impregnable blockade, crippling the U.S. economy. The British depended on American grain, and it couldn't be ruled out that they would seek to gain control over exports from the Midwest in order to guarantee their own economic security. The fear of British power helped define the Civil War and the decades afterward.

Cuba was the key. In the hands of a hostile foreign power, it was as effective a plug to the Mississippi as taking New Orleans. The weakness of the Spaniards frightened the Americans. Any powerful European power — the British or, after 1871, the Germans — could easily knock the Spaniards out of Cuba. And the United States, lacking a powerful navy, would not be able to cope. Seizing Cuba became an imperative of U.S. strategy. Theodore Roosevelt, who as president would oversee America's emergence as a major naval power — and who helped ensure the construction of the Panama Canal, which was critical to a two-ocean navy — became the symbol of the U.S. seizure of Cuba in the Spanish-American War of 1898-1900.

With that seizure, New Orleans-Atlantic transit was secured. The United States maintained effective control over Cuba until the rise of Fidel Castro. But the United States remained anxious about Cuba's security. By itself, the island could not threaten the supply lines. In the hands of a significant hostile power, however, Cuba could become a base for strangling the United States. Before World War II, when there were some rumblings of German influence in Cuba, the United States did what it could to assure the rise of former Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista, considered an American ally or puppet, depending on how you looked at it. But this is the key: Whenever a major foreign power showed interest in Cuba, the United States had to react, which it did effectively until Castro seized power in 1959.
The Soviet Influence

If the Soviets were looking for a single point from which they could threaten American interests, they would find no place more attractive than Cuba. Therefore, whether Fidel Castro was a communist prior to seizing power, it would seem that he would wind up a communist ally of the Soviets in the end. I suspect he had become a communist years before he took power but wisely hid this, knowing that an openly communist ruler in Cuba would revive America's old fears. Alternatively, he might not have been a communist but turned to the Soviets out of fear of U.S. intervention. The United States, unable to read the revolution, automatically moved toward increasing its control. Castro, as a communist or agrarian reformer or whatever he was, needed an ally against U.S. involvement. Whether the arrangement was planned for years, as I suspect, or in a sudden rush, the Soviets saw it as a marriage made in heaven.

Had the Soviets never placed nuclear weapons in Cuba, the United States still would have opposed a Soviet ally in control of Cuba during the Cold War. This was hardwired into American geopolitics. But the Soviets did place missiles there, which is a story that must be touched on as well.

The Soviet air force lacked long-range strategic bombardment aircraft. In World War II, they had focused on shorter range, close air support aircraft to assist ground operations. The United States, engaging both Germany and Japan from the air at long range, had extensive experience with long-range bombing. Therefore, during the 1950s, the United States based aircraft in Europe, and then, with the B-52 in the continental United States, was able to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. The Soviets, lacking a long-range bomber fleet, could not retaliate against the United States. The balance of power completely favored the United States.

The Soviets planned to leapfrog the difficult construction of a manned bomber fleet by moving to intercontinental ballistic missiles. By the early 1960s, the design of these missiles had advanced, but their deployment had not. The Soviets had no effective deterrent against a U.S. nuclear attack except for their still-underdeveloped submarine fleet. The atmosphere between the United States and the Soviet Union was venomous, and Moscow could not assume that Washington would not use its dwindling window of opportunity to strike safely against the Soviets.

The Soviets did have effective intermediate range ballistic missiles. Though they could not reach the United States from the Soviet Union, they could cover almost all of the United States from Cuba. The Russians needed to buy just a little time to deploy a massive intercontinental ballistic missile and submarine force. Cuba was the perfect spot from which to deploy it. Had they succeeded, the Soviets would have closed the U.S. window of opportunity by placing a deterrent force in Cuba. They were caught before they were ready. The United States threatened invasion, and the Soviets had to assume that the Americans also were threatening an overwhelming nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. They had to back down. As it happened, the United States intended no such attack, but the Soviets could not know that.

Cuba was seared into the U.S. strategic mentality in two layers. It was never a threat by itself. Under the control of a foreign naval power, it could strangle the United States. After the Soviet Union tried to deploy intermediate range ballistic missiles there, a new layer was created in which Cuba was a potential threat to the American mainland, as well as to trade routes. The agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union included American guarantees not to invade Cuba and Soviet guarantees not to base nuclear weapons there. But Cuba remained a problem for the United States. If there were a war in Europe, Cuba would be a base from which to threaten American control of the Caribbean, and with it, the ability to transit ships from the U.S. Pacific Fleet to the Atlantic. The United States never relieved pressure on Cuba, the Soviets used it as a base for many things aside from nuclear weapons (we assume), and the Castro regime clung to the Soviets for security while supporting wars of national liberation, as they were called, in Latin America and Africa that served Soviet strategic interests.
Post-Soviet Cuba

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Castro lost his patron and strategic guarantor. On the other hand, Cuba no longer threatened the United States. There was an implicit compromise. Since Cuba was no longer a threat to the United States but could still theoretically become one, Washington would not end its hostility toward Havana but would not actively try to overthrow it. The Cuban government, for its part, promised not to do what it could not truly do anyway: become a strategic threat to the United States. Cuba remained a nuisance in places like Venezuela, but a nuisance is not a strategic threat. Thus, the relationship remained frozen.

Since the Louisiana Purchase, Cuba has been a potential threat to the United States when held by or aligned with a major European power. The United States therefore constantly tried to shape Cuba's policies, and therefore, its internal politics. Fidel Castro's goal was to end American influence, but he could only achieve that by aligning with a major power: the Soviets. Cuban independence from the United States required a dependence on the Soviets. And that, like all relationships, carried a price.

The exchange of prisoners is interesting. The opening of embassies is important. But the major question remains unanswered. For the moment, there are no major powers able to exploit Cuba's geographical location (including China, for now). There are, therefore, no critical issues. But no one knows the future. Cuba wants to preserve its government and is seeking a release of pressure from the United States. At the moment, Cuba really does not matter. But moments pass, and no one can guarantee that it will not become important again. Therefore, the U.S. policy has been to insist on regime change before releasing pressure. With Cuba set on regime survival, what do the Cubans have to offer? They can promise permanent neutrality, but such pledges are of limited value.

Cuba needs better relations with the United States, particularly if the Venezuelan government falls. Venezuela's poor economy could, theoretically, force regime change in Cuba from internal pressure. Moreover, Raul Castro is old and Fidel Castro is very old. If the Cuban government is to be preserved, it must be secured now, because it is not clear what will succeed the Castros. But the United States has time, and its concern about Cuba is part of its DNA. Having no interest now, maintaining pressure makes no sense. But neither is there an urgency for Washington to let up on Havana. Obama may want a legacy, but the logic of the situation is that the Cubans need this more than the Americans, and the American price for normalization will be higher than it appears at this moment, whether set by Obama or his successor.

We are far from settling a strategic dispute rooted in Cuba's location and the fact that its location could threaten U.S. interests. Therefore, opening moves are opening moves. There is a long way to go on this issue.

[Crafty_Dog]

second post

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/07/01/cuba-demands-return-of-guantanamo-end-of-us-tv-broadcasts-in-return-for-diplomacy/

[DougMacG]

second post
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/07/01/cuba-demands-return-of-guantanamo-end-of-us-tv-broadcasts-in-return-for-diplomacy/

 
Just say no.  It would make a good place to lock up the Castros, IMHO.

[Crafty_Dog]

After Baraq's self-castration negotiations with Iran  and his restoration of diplomatic relations "negotiations" with Cuba,  and his ongoing release of enemy combatants from Gitmo to go kill Americans again, it occurs to me  there may be something even more insidious at play with Baraq's plan to empty Gitmo.

Apparently Gitmo is held by American AS A LEASE since 1903.  The Castro regime has refused to cash the payments we have made since Castro took power.  So, if Baraq empties Gitmo and orders our troops there home, it would appear that Cuba walks in and simply takes it over.

What might Cuba do with a quality navy base like Gitmo?  Might it lease it Russia?  China?  Iran?  North Korea? 

They say the three most important things about property are location, location, and location.  How much is a navy base located right in the neighborhood of the mouth of the Mississippi River? 

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/02/u-s-removed-cuba-from-terrorist-list-after-hezbollah-opened-base-on-island/

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.facebook.com/CUBA630/videos/963606547045378/

[DougMacG]

Whatever the opposite of rest in peace is my wish here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/farewell-to-cubas-brutal-big-brother/2016/11/26/d369affe-0eeb-11e6-bfa1-4efa856caf2a_story.html?utm_term=.f9c6a69db966

If this were a just world, 13 facts would be etched on Castro’s tombstone and highlighted in every obituary, as bullet points — a fitting metaphor for someone who used firing squads to murder thousands of his own people.

●He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.

●He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth.

●He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba that a precise number is hard to reckon.

●He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling them to capacity, incarcerating a higher percentage of his own people than most other modern dictators, including Stalin.

●He condoned and encouraged torture and extrajudicial killings.

●He forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile, and prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while fleeing from him in crude vessels.

●He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen, strangled food production and impoverished the vast majority of his people.

●He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions, wiped out Cuba’s large middle class and turned Cubans into slaves of the state.

●He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate religion.

[Crafty_Dog]

Nov. 26, 2016 2:42 p.m. ET


Fidel Castro’s legacy of 57 years in power is best understood by the fates of two groups of his countrymen—those who remained in Cuba and suffered impoverishment and dictatorship, and those who were lucky or brave enough to flee to America to make their way in freedom. No progressive nostalgia after his death Friday at age 90 should disguise this murderous and tragic record.

Castro took power on New Year’s Day in 1959 serenaded by the Western media for toppling dictator Fulgencio Batista and promising democracy. He soon revealed that his goal was to impose Communist rule. He exiled clergy, took over Catholic schools and expropriated businesses. Firing squads and dungeons eliminated rivals and dissenters.

The terror produced a mass exodus. An April 1961 attempt by the CIA and a small force of expatriate Cubans to overthrow Castro was crushed at the Bay of Pigs in a fiasco for the Kennedy Administration. Castro aligned himself with the Soviet Union, and their 1962 attempt to establish a Soviet missile base on Cuba nearly led to nuclear war. The crisis was averted after Kennedy sent warships to intercept the missiles, but the Soviets extracted a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba again.

The Cuba that Castro inherited was developing but relatively prosperous. It ranked third in Latin America in per-capita daily calorie consumption, doctors and dentists. Its infant mortality rate was the lowest in the region and the 13th lowest in the world. Cubans were among the most literate Latins and had a vibrant civic life with private professional, commercial, religious and charitable organizations.
[object Object]

Castro destroyed all that. He ruined agriculture by imposing collective farms, making Cuba dependent first on the Soviets and later on oil from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. In the last half century Cuba’s export growth has been less than Haiti’s, and now even doctors are scarce because so many are sent abroad to earn foreign currency. Hospitals lack sheets and aspirin. The average monthly income is $20 and government food rations are inadequate.

All the while Fidel and his brother Raúl sought to spread their Communist revolution throughout the world, especially in Latin America. They backed the FARC in Colombia, the Shining Path in Peru and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Their propaganda about peasant egalitarian movements beguiled thousands of Westerners, from celebrities like Sean Penn and Danny Glover to Secretary of State John Kerry, who on a visit to Havana called the U.S. and Cuba “prisoners of history.” The prisoners are in Cuban jails.

On this score, President Obama’s morally antiseptic statement Saturday on Castro is an insult to his victims. “We know that this moment fills Cubans—in Cuba and in the United States—with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation,” Mr. Obama said. “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.” Donald Trump, by contrast, called Castro a “dictator” and expressed hope for a “free Cuba.”

Mr. Obama’s 2014 decision to normalize U.S.-Cuba relations has provided new business opportunities for the regime but has yielded nothing in additional freedom. Americans can now travel and make limited investment in Cuba but hard currency wages for workers are confiscated by the government in return for nearly worthless pesos. In 2006 Forbes estimated Fidel’s net worth, based on his control of “a web of state-owned companies,” at $900 million.

The hope of millions of Cubans, exiled and still on the island, has been that Fidel’s death might finally lead to change, but unwinding nearly six decades of Castro rule will be difficult. The illusions of Communism have given way to a military state that still arrests and beats women on their way to church. China and Russia both allow more economic freedom. The regime fears that easing up on dissent, entrepreneurship or even access to the internet would lead to its inevitable demise.

Castro’s Cuba exists today as a reminder of the worst of the 20th-century when dictators invoked socialist ideals to hammer human beings into nails for the state. Too many Western fellow-travelers indulged its fantasies as long as they didn’t have to live there. Perhaps the influence of Cuba’s exiles will be able, over time, to reseed the message of liberty on the island. But freedom starts by seeing clearly the human suffering that Fidel Castro wrought.

[ccp]

I notice you didn't put this in the "RIP" thread 

[Crafty_Dog]

 

[G M]

Burn in hell, Fidel.

Hillary's loss and now this. It's a rough time for the left.

[Crafty_Dog]

So, Fidel became a good communist on Black Friday , , , 

[DDF]

I feel terrible... for the Obamas.... they lost a close, personal, family friend today... well... not terrible.... Just pointing out the Obamas' loss.


I wonder if the flag will fly at half mast.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432680/myth-cuban-health-care?utm_source=nr&utm_medium=facebook%3Futm_content%3Dnordlinger%3Futm_campaign%3Dcastro

When I was in Cuba in 1980 the two pharmacies I saw were virtually devoid of anything.

[G M]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432680/myth-cuban-health-care?utm_source=nr&utm_medium=facebook%3Futm_content%3Dnordlinger%3Futm_campaign%3Dcastro

When I was in Cuba in 1980 the two pharmacies I saw were virtually devoid of anything.

Strange how often bad luck strikes scientific socialism.

[Crafty_Dog]

Haven't read this yet, posting it for reference:
http://www.faithwire.com/2016/11/28/heres-a-handy-list-of-atrocities-for-everyone-glorifying-fidel-castro-today/

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/11/30/bret-baier-new-path-for-us-and-cuba-what-ike-and-jfk-might-tell-president-elect-trump.html

[Crafty_Dog]

Castro and Human Dignity
Five or six prisoners would be confined for days in very narrow 6-foot-long cells.
 ENLARGE
A motorcade carries the ashes of Fidel Castro toward a cemetery in Santiago, Cuba, Dec. 4. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
By
MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY
Updated Dec. 4, 2016 9:38 p.m. ET

Notwithstanding the celebrations in the streets of Miami, the most widespread reaction among Cubans—at home and abroad—to the demise of Fidel Castro seems to be relief. One of the great narcissists of all time, father of nearly 60 years of national torment, has returned to dust. That alone is consolation.

Castro left a once-prosperous and promising land in dire poverty. But his legacy is far worse than the material ruin of a nation. His insatiable appetite for absolute power was manifest in an obsession with hunting down every last nonconformist, stripping away the human dignity of the population.

This reality is worth revisiting as the world offers retrospectives on Castro’s life, almost always adding that the tyrant gave Cuba great health care. If it were true it could not justify his brutality. And it is not true, as we learned in 2007 when Cuban doctors botched his treatment for diverticulitis and a Spanish specialist had to be flown in to save him. The truth is that the regime doesn’t give a fig about human life.

Castro thrived on a maniacal ambition to possess and dominate the Cuban soul, and nowhere are the consequences more visible than in the country’s sky-high abortion rates. In a Nov. 22 story for the news website CUBANET, independent journalist Eliseo Matos cited an abortion study by Cuban doctors Luisa Álvarez Vásquez and Nelli Salomón Avich. They found that since 1980, one-third of all Cuban pregnancies have been terminated.
 
Equally troubling, abortion rates are high among adolescents and often mandated by the state. You don’t have to be religious to see this as a national existential crisis—the reflection of a society struggling against nihilism.

This didn’t happen overnight. It is the output of decades of living under a dictatorship that demands nothing less than total surrender to the will of one person. In a 1986interview with the Los Angeles Times, Armando Valladares, who was a Castro prisoner for 22 years, described the regime’s use of the “drawer cells” in its dungeons. Five or six prisoners would be confined, for days, in these very narrow, 6-foot-long spaces. “They had to sit with their knees against their body. There was no room to move; prisoners had to urinate and defecate right there,” Mr. Valladares explained.

All torture was used “to break the prisoner’s resistance,” Mr. Valladares said. If a prisoner said “he had been wrong, if he denied his religious beliefs, saying they were from the obscure ages, and if he admitted that he now understood that communism was the solution to mankind’s problems and he wanted to have the opportunity to re-enter the new communist society, then he could escape the cell and be put in a re-education farm.”

There could be no higher power, no one revered more than Fidel. God was a problem so priests and nuns were imprisoned and exiled, religion was outlawed and the regime did all it could to destroy the Cuban family.

In 1997 Christmas was legalized and Catholic and Protestant churches have slowly been granted some space. But this is allowed only as long as teachings about the sacredness of human life don’t interfere with regime control. Thus Havana’s Cardinal Ortega distances himself from the dissident group of Catholic women known as the Ladies in White, even when they are regularly beaten on the streets.

In a system where all must bow to the state, it is not surprising abortion rates are especially high among adolescents. Children learn about human sexuality from their communist teachers, in purely mechanical terms of course. Generations of teens have been taken away from their families and sent to work camps in the countryside as part of their indoctrination.

As Mr. Valladares wrote in The Wall Street Journal in May 2000, “Away from all parental supervision for nine months at a time, children there suffer from venereal disease, as well as teenage pregnancy, which inevitably ends in forced abortion.” Another reason for high adolescent abortion rates is that teenage prostitutes now populate the streets of Havana, working for hard currency from tourists.

Abortion is also a key regime tool for “health care.” Any pregnancy considered risky is immediately terminated, a decision made by the state. This drives down infant mortality rates, which Cuba uses to impress the world about its “progress.”

Yet Cuba hasn’t achieved anything special in infant mortality. In a Dec. 1 blog post on the Cato Institute’s HumanProgress website, Marian Tupy pointed out that between 1963 and 2015 infant mortality in Cuba declined by 90% while it declined by 94% in Chile. In Latin America and the Caribbean overall it is down 86%.

Fidel Castro’s only unique accomplishment was 57 years of repression that sought to exterminate any meaning to life for those who lived under his boot.
Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.